Hello!
I’m reaching out to promote my hybrid summer undergraduate course, CMS 240 A: YouTube Criticism, or How We Write About Social Media. It’s a great way for students to fulfill a writing credit or contribute to required credits outside of their major.
Course description—
Despite their ubiquity, we often fail to see beyond the surface of social media platforms. Perhaps we see them as a natural part of twenty-first century life, or perhaps we do not want to jeopardize the immediate comfort they sometimes offer us in our chaotic world. Today, it is more important than ever to challenge our assumptions about the digital networks that structure our lives, and to learn how to clearly articulate our ideas and beliefs about them. This course will challenge you to both take seriously your own personal experiences with social media and push you to think beyond them. We will engage a range of methodologies from Production Studies to Media Philosophy to explore questions such as, what are different ways to study and understand social media? How are platforms structured and regulated and by whom? and how do social media figure into beliefs about the power of digital communications technologies more broadly? By the end of this course, you will be able to integrate a variety of approaches to the study social media in a piece of critical, argumentative writing about a research topic of your choice. Although we will examine several platforms and associated technologies, we will always return to YouTube as our primary object of focus for our analyses. Drawing upon contemporary scholarship and YouTube content itself, we will nuance our understanding of the intersections between media, technology, and society. (Please note that this course is hybrid. All assignments can be completed remotely. In-class lectures will be recorded and posted to Canvas.)